“We Know About Things Too”: Exploring the Labors of Love Involved in Cultivating Youth Voice in Online Youth Civic Engagement Programs With Youth of Color

Introduction

Researchers have argued that the social media environment provides unprecedented opportunities for youth engagement in political discussion (Bowyer et al., 2017; Graef, 2016; Jenkins et al., 2016; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2018; Xenos et al., 2014). But while scholars frequently have focused their analyses on what happens online in social media spaces (see, e.g., Kligler-Vilenchik & Literat, 2018; Lane et al., 2022), the existing research in the U.S. context often overlooks how U.S. young people find their way into these civic and political online spaces in the first place, and what happens after they express themselves there. Youth civic participation in the U.S. has long been unequal across race, class, and gender (Gaby, 2017; Morales-Doyle & Frederick, 2018; Starbird et al., 2019). This makes questions of how young People of Color enter into online civic engagement, and how critical media literacy and civic engagement programs support these efforts, particularly pressing (Broadwater, 2011).

Educators, social work staff members, volunteers, and others who work with Youth of Color to support civic participation often refer to their efforts as a “labor of love.” The phrase suggests that some of “the work,” or the “heavy lift” of such programs, involves efforts that go beyond the work of developing programs, training young people in critical thinking, or promoting youth voice among stakeholders, each of which has been reviewed in prior scholarship (Alvermann et al., 2018; Buckingham et al., 2005; Hobbs & Jensen, 2009). “The work,” as scholars in Critical Race Theory (CRT) traditions have argued, also involves critical consciousness development and emotional support for Youth of Color identity formation, and must occur in relationships of trust and mutuality (Dalal-Clayton & Puri Purini, 2022; Yosso, 2006).

This article analyzes various ways that this “work” manifests itself in five youth media efforts that sought to support civic engagement and leadership development efforts among 51 young people from marginalized communities across several neighborhoods in one city over a 5-year period.

To avoid adopting a deficit framework that stigmatizes young People of Color as at-risk, we instead follow critical scholars such as Victor Rios (2011, 2017), who argues for an asset-based framework that identifies all Youth of Color growing up in underresourced situations as “At-Promise” youth. Focusing on the lived experiences of At-Promise young people of varied racial ethnic backgrounds from low-income communities who self-selected into opportunities for online youth civic engagement and leadership, we argue that the labors of love involved in cultivating youth voice are best understood through the lenses of feminist and anti-racism theories about emotional labor: specifically, invisible, emotional, and invisible labor and anti-racism work.

After detailing our critical ethnographic methods on the actual work of engaging young people, we then lay out three stages to the labor involved in mitigating the barriers to online youth political engagement: (1) the labor of developing and facilitating youth online civic engagement programs, which includes the labors of program design, building and maintaining trust-based relationships, and supporting fact-based youth productions; (2) the labor of preparing youth for and facilitating interactions with political decision makers; and (3) the labor of processing interactions with those decision makers after the fact in order to position young people for future interactions. We argue that as this research highlights barriers and the behind-the-scenes efforts undertaken to overcome such barriers, this research thus contributes to how critical media literacy efforts might play a role in ensuring robust democratic and representative participation in the U.S. We begin with a discussion of programs that support critical media literacy and online youth civic engagement.

Literature Review: Online Civic Engagement, Critical Media Literacy, and Youth Voice

Civic participation shapes civic and political concerns and can provide young people with a sense of identity and purpose (Verba et al., 1995). Nevertheless, critical media literacy advocates have insisted that inequities in access to online youth civic engagement opportunities must be addressed for the sake of a democratic future (Mihailidis et al., 2021). This is at least in part because research has found that media literacy, defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication, can strengthen critical thinking about sources and message content, thereby also supporting youth development toward civic engagement and introducing protective factors against disinformation (Austin et al., 2018; Barron et al., 2014; Mihailidis, 2018). Some researchers have even termed media literacy a “survival tool” for marginalized youth, emphasizing the fact that education has long been at the center of movements for civil rights and social justice (Celeste, 2019).

Following Barrett and Pachi (2019), we define civic and political engagement broadly as any participatory behavior in which young people engage with the concerns, interests, and common good of a community. We similarly define online youth civic engagement, following Cohen and Kahne (2011), as efforts that employ new media tools to exert voice and influence on such issues of public concern (Kahne & Middaugh, 2012; Kahne et al., 2012; Middaugh & Asato, 2020).

Utilizing critical ethnographic methods, we devoted our studies to a close analysis of young peoples’ lived experiences with online civic engagement activities and to the efforts undertaken by adult and young adult leaders to support and learn from those young people. Critical ethnography seeks to better understand the lived experiences of oppression, engaging young people in working collaboratively to articulate the connections they perceived between online civic engagement, structural inequities, and the suffering experienced by individuals in our communities (Dutta, 2014). We therefore seek to elaborate the labors of love involved in cultivating youth voice for online civic engagement as a means of making the invisible visible and revealing structural inequities that demand, but yet cannot be completely eliminated by, those labors.

Cultivating Youth Voice: The Invisible Labors of Love

The work of cultivating youth voice among Youth of Color through online civic engagement involves quite a bit of labor that has gone unrecognized, and that sits at the intersection of two sites where there are traditionally low levels of pay and high levels of invisible, emotional, and relational labor: formal secondary education and media production skills.

Emotional labor refers to work that requires face-to-face interactions and that requires relational competence (Hochschild, 1983). It is a key part of teaching and also the growing service economy, in which workers are expected to express organizationally desired emotions as a condition of their employment and pay (Cheung et al., 2011; Collins et al., 2021; De Castro et al., 2004). Labor that takes place in the public realm, is paid, is profit generating, and sometimes is state regulated, contrasts with the emotional labor of the teacher’s job, which is therefore also sometimes described as invisible labor (Crain et al., 2016). Women have long been associated with the invisible labor of the household, where the labor of meal preparation has been articulated as an expression of gender or as an “act of love” (DeVault, 1991). But there is also profit-generating labor that is more or less invisible, such as labor in agriculture, auto parts assembly, and in snack food production (Boris & Prugl, 2016; Holmes, 2013).

Another aspect of invisible labor involves the building and sustaining of relationships through social media platforms. Baym (2015) argued that relational labor was an important route to profitability among professional musicians in the social media era, as musicians came to be expected to relate to fans in social media spaces. The labor of relationship-building has also long been viewed as part of the expected skill set for educators and those working with young people (Gazda, 1977). In the following section we describe our approach and project participants as we sought to understand the emotional, invisible, and relational forms of labor that took place across a range of online youth civic engagement efforts we oversaw and later analyzed.

Method: Critical Ethnography

The ethnographic research for this article received approval through the institutional review board at the home university of the researchers and received consent from parents and assent from participants under the age of 18 years. We utilized participant observation and a review of field notes and recorded meetings as methods for understanding the activities of those young people who were involved in the five civic engagement programs we studied, each of which were designed according to participatory action research principles (Akom et al., 2008) and described fully elsewhere (Jimenez et al., 2021, 2022; Schofield Clark et al., 2023). We also had weekly team meetings with facilitators and researchers and engaged in reflection to monitor our own subjectivity and development of trust with youth. The activities took place under the umbrella of not-for-profit organizations that had longer-term paid leadership teams overseeing other programming for the young people and for members of their families.

Each author has extensive experience carrying out community-engaged research projects and youth development programs with marginalized communities of color in rural and urban environments. Two authors are Latinx males: one has a background in facilitating action research projects with immigrant workers utilizing new media and the second has two decades of experience working youth leadership development programs; the third author is a White woman and has co-developed and co-facilitated youth development media literacy programs in and outside schools within low income marginalized communities of color (i.e., public housing developments) in Denver, Colorado.

The first of the youth organizations was the Gang Rescue and Support Project (GRASP), a Denver youth intervention program that conducted a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project focused on examining the structural and institutional disparities experienced by low-income youth of color in their communities. The GRASP YPAR team was comprised of one African American and three Latino ¹ male adolescents ages 16 to 18 years, two Black male GRASP youth workers

The next four projects involved youth from YELL (Youth Engaged in Leadership and Learning), which was a Denver youth intervention program for young people in junior and senior high school (ages 13–17 years) who lived in economically precarious neighborhoods where the average household income was well below the median. The young participants were recruited based on their involvement in the year-round YELL after-school program that was a part of a University of Denver K-12 leadership development and academic support program in existence for 25 years and located in four impoverished neighborhoods. In the YELL summer projects between 2017 and 2020 all but 6 of the 30 adult mentors were White and all but 5 of the 47 young participants were persons of color. Participating youth included: 5 Latinas; 2 Latinos; 2 Asian-American females and 6 Asian American males; 10 African American males and 17 African American females; 4 White females and 1 White male. The majority of youth lived in public housing and were part of larger families (5+ members). What many youth in our study shared was a desire to be part of a project that valued their ideas and contributions, which has been examined in previous publications (Jimenez et al., 2021, 2022; Schofield Clark et al., 2023).

We utilized Dedoose software to develop a codebook and identified and coded themes related to patterns of online civic engagement, approaches to learning both about content and technologies, interactions between youth and young adult mentors, and experiences of constraint and challenge as well as efforts made to mitigate or negotiate those challenges. We identified the three stages in which the groups engaged in what we term the labors of love of cultivating youth voice for online youth civic engagement, and then triangulated our findings by contacting others who were leading neighborhood youth programming with a civic or political engagement component during the pandemic, creating and sharing memos to further refine themes and identify common patterns.

We characterize our method as critical ethnography following Thomas (1993), who notes that such work moves from the question of, “what is this?” to the question of, “What could this be?” Critical ethnography is thus both hermeneutic and emancipatory, aiming to recognize characteristics of late capitalism that create situations of domination and oppression so that research might play a role in contributing to changing those situations (May, 1997). Thus, we utilized theoretical sampling, selecting participants based on their manifestation of theoretical constructs, in this case young people (13–17) who wished to engage in online civic engagement efforts with adult mentors in order to effect positive change in their communities, so as to better to understand barriers to youth civic participation and to bring nuance to how some work to mediate those barriers via “labors of love.”

Examining the Labors of Love in Youth Online Civic and Political Engagement

Researchers, particularly in the areas of digital media and learning, have offered helpful analyses of the contextual components necessary for young people to pursue online civic engagement endeavors, demystifying the processes through which young people come to such manifest engagement (Blum-Ross, 2015). It is important to recognize, as Elisabeth Soep (2014) has noted, that “participatory politics don’t come automatically, even for young people raised on mobile devices and digital media” (p. 6). Young people need support to develop a wide-ranging set of skills and experiences to become civically engaged, and they need opportunities for experimentation. Yet as we have argued, the labor in which adults engage to make this skill development possible can also be made more visible. In this section, we present three areas of this labor.

Discussion

Young people in the online civic engagement programs we analyzed recognized that they “know about things too” and that they have “important stuff” to share with policymakers. Yet there were instances of invisible, emotional, and relational labor that were necessary and that went beyond online civic engagement to bring those perspectives into conversation with the ongoing work of policymakers, as this article has described. These three forms of labor share various characteristics, such as consisting of time consuming and complex work, and most importantly, they can lead to a positive or experience for a political newcomer. Building on this article’s earlier discussion of invisible labor as that which is often performed behind the scenes yet is necessary for the goals of online youth civic engagement programs, adults and adult mentors engaged in continuous program design and program modification.

As adults we also engaged in relational labor. We leveraged our contacts and our adult status with journalists and elected officials, using social media to amplify youth forms of political expression and to arrange meetings with decision makers. We also helped young people to recognize the ways that they might leverage their relationships and their status via social media platforms, helping them to build followings and to garner attention among the audiences they were seeking. Finally, we also engaged in emotional labor. We encouraged young people to voice their political and civic aspirations and listened sympathetically both when their interactions with policymakers were rewarding and when they did not turn out as well as they had hoped. We also worked patiently with young people to help them to come to recognize when their online civic engagement messages were factually inaccurate, doing so in a sensitive way that aimed to augment their message’s effectiveness without undermining their passion

The young political newcomers we worked with recognized that their online civic engagement efforts that sought to speak with their peers, with fellow movement builders, and with elected officials were only a first step in working toward change. Thus whereas in this article we have detailed several aspects of the labor involved in designing and implementing youth online civic engagement projects, we are also able to address more closely the incongruities at the interpersonal, technological/organizational, and systemic levels that constituted barriers to youth online civic engagement and that were revealed in the invisible, emotional and relational labor undertaken in these projects.

At the interpersonal level, young people experienced incongruities between how they wished to interact with policymakers, and the ways that systems were structured to limit their interactions and to constrain their involvement in actual processes of legislation and policymaking. As noted, they found that politicians were happy to speak with them when adults put in the labor to arrange meetings and help them to prepare for such meetings, but even in such encounters the young people sometimes felt unheard or were concerned that the interactions were short-lived. Whereas they’d wished that politicians would simply pay attention to their online civic engagement messages, they found that this did not happen without adult assistance or amplification

The young people we worked with also experienced incongruity on a systems level. They wanted to collaborate with one another and to leverage media messaging techniques to build interest in their lived experiences, and to a limited extent they were successful in these endeavors. Yet in working alongside adults to navigate technological systems and platforms, the young people came to realize the various ways in which the technology was not developed as a democratic delivery system and in fact was not developed with democratic aims in mind at all. Finally, the young people experienced incongruity on a structural level. Whereas they appreciated the relationships formed and the support they received from adults, young adults, and their peers in developing the online civic engagement efforts they pursued, ultimately, they recognized the tenuousness of the not-for-profit industrial complex in which such efforts were taking place (Burke et al., 2017). The people and relationship-oriented practices central to ideals of democracy were unsustainable because there are no structural forces in place through which they might be sustained.

This article thus reviewed patterns of invisible, emotional, and relational labor that emerged across five different projects aiming to cultivate youth voice through youth online civic engagement. While its findings are suggestive, the research is limited and further research is needed to determine the generalizability of these findings across other similar efforts. A potential limitation of the project is the differing levels of trust among participants and the potential of group think that may have influenced what participants (youth and mentors) chose to share and how much. Moreover, with its focus on invisible, emotional, and relational labors, several questions related to youth online civic engagement remain unanswered. How might decision makers and politicians rethink political spaces and processes to be more youth-centric? How can decision makers leverage social media so as to make systems of governance more receptive to the types of demands youth raise, and more aligned with young people’s own innovative uses of social media for political expression? How, in other words, can the community of adults and decision makers work to alter current systems to address the overwhelming youth challenge of being heard in relation to the policies that shape their lives?

There is also encouraging research that finds that young women of color are more likely than other groups to talk about politics, participate in elections, and fight racism (CIRCLE, 2022), thus offering an important justification for extending research that considers how young people experience efforts to support their online civic and political engagement, and a need for getting that research to policymakers who can prioritize such efforts in community, state, and federal budgets. Yet as we have argued, the issues of online youth political engagement extend beyond those of programs to structural issues. The labors of love involved in cultivating youth voice for civic engagement can involve raising awareness about these structural limitations but cannot be expected to fully mitigate those limitations.

Conclusion

This paper has identified three “labors of love” that are inherent in the work of cultivating youth voice for online civic engagement: the labor of developing and facilitating youth online civic engagement programs, which includes the labors of program design, building and maintaining trust-based relationships, and supporting fact-based youth productions; the labor of preparing youth for and facilitating interactions with political decision makers; and the labor of processing interactions with those decision makers after the fact in order to position young people for future democratic interactions. As we have described, each of these labors of love involve a mix of invisible, emotional, and relational labor that, when highlighted, help to reveal some of the barriers to youth online civic engagement and the various efforts that young people and adults are making to address and mitigate those barriers.

Our hope is that by identifying and describing these forms of labor, future research can further consider the labors of love that constitute the behind the scenes work of youth civic engagement efforts. This will enable researchers and those working with young people, as well as young people themselves, to engage in further conversations about best-practices and lessons learned. This, in turn, may foster for political newcomers safe and productive spaces in which to explore, pursue, and give voice to the political issues that are most important to them.